Day Two Web Summit Review

November 6, 2014

The second day of the Web Summit in Dublin took the #DavosForGeeks tag seriously, with major announcements from some big players in the technology game.

Nest Labs CEO and founder Tony Fadell announced a deal that will provide Irish customers with a free Nestthermostat by signing a two year utility contract with Electric Ireland. The Irish deal is the first of several where consumers will have the cost of a Nest subsidized by their utility companies. Although Nest is now owned by Google, Tony Fadell claims it is operating independently from it’s new parent and will not be sharing data with them. Time will tell.

OnePlus One founder and director Carl Pei was in town and announced that OnePlus One sales have now reached half a million. The low price, high specs smartphone is sold only by invitation. Pei mentioned that OnePlus One is only making a single-figure dollar amount per phone and though this is not the way the company will make money in the future, it will remain as their primary revenue stream in the short term.

Jonathan Klein , CEO Getty Images , argued that he can never see a world where intellectual property is free. Getty Images now claim that they self-disrupted as heritage and revenue model lay in the print photography age. When established it could take anytyhing up to seven weeks for approval to use images to reach their clients. Last year, the company sold 105 million images online and in real-time.

Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture pointed out that by 2020 there will be 50 billion digital devices around the world. This means that the Internet Of Things will dwarf the mobile industry in the near future. Meanwhile, Jeff Hagins, Founder & CTO of SmartThings criticized the lack of standards in IoT communication and asked for an open source language for local and remote access to devices.

Finally, Twitter President of Revenue, Adam Bain dismissed concerns about Twitter’s business model, saying Twitter “was just getting started”. Twitter is diversifying its revenue streams between advertising, data services and a new, currently in Beta, e-commerce function. Twitter came to an agreement with IBM to allow the technology group to use Twitter’s data in their enterprise tools and consulting services. This gives IBM access to “the largest set of public conversations available” by Twitter’s account.

284 million unique users use the Twitter site monthly and 600 million visit the site on a monthly basis. The new e-commerce product is hoping to bridge the gap between tweeting about a product and buying that product. By adding click-to-buy functionality Twitter hopes to prove that it can be a place that people buy products in addition to discussing about them.

It’s going to be hard to top that but I’m sure with Bono making the closing address and hundreds of presentations across the multiple arenas and stages we’ll see some major messages during the course of the final day, today.